


Like Sweet Nightshade

by devilinthedetails



Series: Free Spirit [12]
Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Childbirth, Death, Family, Gen, Love, Memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25920232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: At the end of all things, the Black God claims Lianne's soul.
Relationships: Alan of Pirate's Swoop/Lianne II of Conté, Lianne II of Conte/OC
Series: Free Spirit [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864777
Kudos: 5





	Like Sweet Nightshade

Like Sweet Nightshade

At the end of all things, as the child within her ripped its way out of her, tearing her body deeper and more painfully than a broken heart so that too much of her blood seeped scarlet onto her silken sheets, Lianne’s mind drifted like a feather in the wind back to a conversation she’d shared with Jasson at a table in a palace library. 

She remembered Jasson’s cutting jade eyes glancing up from a tome about herbs in which he’d buried his nose for hours and informing her of a new fact he’d learned. “It’s the sweetness of the nightshade that lures the unwary victim into eating it fresh from the bush or in a goblet of wine. Ingesting just two to four berries can kill a child, and ten to twenty berries would be all that is needed to snuff the life out of an adult. Did you know that?” 

“No.” Lianne hadn’t known that and didn’t see any reason why she would want to know that. Knowing that made her profoundly uncomfortable. Wriggling on her seat as if she had ants in her undergarments, she decided that she didn’t believe a word her brother had said. He must have just woven that lie whole-cloth to scare her and pretended that he had read it in the book before him. It was only an elaborate deception that she shouldn’t allow to disconcert her. “I don’t that’s true either. I think you’re making that up because something so small couldn’t possibly kill things as large as people.” 

“You don’t want to believe that, but that doesn’t make it untrue.” Jasson’s voice was irritatingly matter-of-fact for someone who had only stumbled upon this fact mere moments ago. “Ours lives are our whole worlds, and we don’t want to believe that our worlds can be ended so swiftly by something so small because that must mean our lives—our worlds—are so small and weak that a handful of berries can end them. We don’t want to face that knowledge but that doesn’t mean it’s untrue.” 

“My life—my world—isn’t small and weak,” Lianne had snapped, snatching up the volume of courtly love poems she had been reading before Jasson interrupted her with his disturbing, innate notions and storming out of the library to find a quieter place where she could sink into a rapture over the romantic verses in peace. 

Feeling her life fade as the edges of her world folded into tightening darkness that her made her claustrophobic, choking her so that it was as if she couldn’t breathe even as she howled until her throat was sore and her lungs ached for Alan rather than the husband who sat indifferent and solid as a bolder beside her—in Maren, husbands were allowed in the birthing chamber unlike in Tortall, where birth was a sacred mystery of the Goddess not to be penetrated by men who might violate its sanctity— as she lay dying. Dying as she gave birth to a child that could have been Alan’s or Rurik’s, she’d never know which. 

Her eyes, flicking desperately around the walls of her room for some source of solace and strength, lit on the comforting, radiant colors of a rich tapestry. Her life had been a tapestry of vibrant colors and confused patterns it was impossible to understand until viewed from a distance. 

A tapestry woven in the royal purple of her birth, in the burning flame-red of the hot blood of her passion and forbidden love, mournful blue for the misery of her marriage to a man she had come to despise with every bone in her body, and sun-bright oranges and yellows for the simple joy she had always discovered in Alan’s arms. A tapestry of perplexing politics, of extravagant feasts, of dazzling balls, of glorious tournaments, of battles, of travel to a foreign land with strange spices and smells, and of romance that had pained and thrilled her in equal measure. 

She could feel that tapestry unraveling at the end of all things—at the end of the world or just her world—as the Black God came to claim her soul, leaving a last, eternally unanswered call for Alan on her lips like sweet nightshade.


End file.
